John Shirley

Rudy Rucker for 'Introduction to HardWired edition of White Light'. San Francisco.

Q: Is there, in brief, a general overall Rucker Theory of the Motif of
the Transreal Books? A linking esthetic?

A: Oh yes! It’s called  “A Transrealist Manifesto,” and it  appears in
my new nonfiction anthology Seek! But let me try and summarize it  for
you.

Transrealism  means  writing  about your  immediate  perceptions  in a
fantastic way. The characters in  a transreal book should be  based on
actual people. This has the effect of making the characters be  richer
and more  interesting. One  inspiration for  me in  doing this is Jack
Kerouac,  who thought  of his  novels as  a single  linked chronicle.
Though many would just call Kerouac’s books autobiographical novels.

My  transreal novels  aren’t exactly  autobiographical: I  have never
really left my body, climbed  an infinite mountain, met a  sphere from
the fourth dimension, infected  television with an intelligent  virus,
etc. But they are autobiographical in that many of the characters  are
modeled  on family  and friends  — the  main person  of course  being
modeled on  me. The  science fictional  ideas in  my transreal fiction
have a special role. They stand in for essential psychic events.

The quest for infinity, for instance, is nothing other than the soul’s
quest  for God.  Or, more  mundanely, it  represents the  individual’s
quest for meaning.  In another sense,  a White Light  at the top  of a
transfinite  mountain  stands for  the  psychedelic experience,  which
loomed  large  in those  years  when White  Light  was written  (1978 
- 1979). But, again, the whole point of the psychedelic experience, at
least from my standpoint, was  to see God. Another inspiration  for me
in pursuing transrealism is Philip K. Dick. His blackly hilarious book
A Scanner Darkly  was a real  inspiration for me  in forming my  ideas
about this  way of  writing. And  in fact  Scanner had  a blurb  on it
describing the book as “transcendental biography,” which was  probably
the reason I coined the word “transreal.”

In a nutshell, transrealism means  writing about reality in an  honest
and objective way, while using  the tools of science fiction  to stand
for deep psychic constructs.